Progression Toward Conformance for C++ Language Compilers

Establishing the conformance of a compiler is a difficult matter, especially for C++, since a standard for the language was slow to develop and acceptance of the standard occurred years after the introduction of the language. In this paper, we re-visit our conformance study presented in June 2002. We describe the construction of our test suite composed of test cases extracted from the code examples in the ISO C++ standard together with the process that we use to remove test cases extracted from examples under investigation by the working committee. We then use our test suite to provide some measure of conformance to the ISO standard for eight popular C++ compilers.